


Any Sufficiently Advanced Magic is Indistinguishable from Technology

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Bees, Developing Relationship, F/F, magical theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 02:23:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6219916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dagna explores Skyhold, and also Sera's pants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Any Sufficiently Advanced Magic is Indistinguishable from Technology

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Luddleston](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luddleston/gifts).



> Dear Luddleston, I hope you enjoy this Wintersend gift! The idea of Sera and Dagna and the issue of magic was a delight to play around with; thank you for giving me the opportunity.
> 
> A number of people people are complicit in this fic being a thing; they know who they are, and blame will be properly assigned after reveals. In particular, though, we wouldn't be where we are today without V's brain. Thanks. ♥

You're meant to lose your stone-sense on the surface, but Dagna has found over the years that you don't need to do anything just because you're meant to, and very few things are actually going to happen to you just because someone says they will. Except death, maybe.

The point is: the stone of Skyhold likes Dagna, knows her. Even reshaped as the stone is into walls and chambers and towers, she lives. She's old and worn and she can remember magic, other magic, other ways to be, and she approves of Dagna because Dagna wants to know.

Some people would say that isn't how stone-sense works in the first place. That stone is stone, the same everywhere, the same guidance, the same life.

Some people just aren't very good at listening.

 

 

Harritt isn't very good at listening, for example. It isn't his fault; he just hears criticism in suggestions. Doesn't like new ideas. A lot of people don't, Dagna knows that, and at least he only grumbles. Her father wasn't good at listening either, but he shouted about it. No daughter of mine.

Grumbling is fine. Grumbling can be tuned out.

So: sit on the railing in the mountain air, mist turning gold in the sunrise. Deep breaths. It's cold, but it could be colder—should be colder, one more piece of magic to pull apart.

So: she's arrived. Years of fighting, years of no, of you can't, of you mustn't. But she can, and she has, and now she sure does need to. The Inquisition needs her to.

To what? Well, whatever, really. Whole realms of possibility.

I knew I could be more, she tells the Herald, who nods with understanding, great horned head bowing. Rethsaam Adaar might actually understand, she thinks, but one can't be sure, even if there are codes to be read. Oh, not about the magic, not her angle on it, that's not likely. So few mages do. But about the other thing, the one behind the magic.

 

 

If she thinks about how the magic thing started, there's an obvious answer: a book, found by chance.

It was laid aside behind Heid's stall in the market together with scraps of leather, broken shards of weapons: things that didn't have a purpose any more, that would fetch no real money, but that could maybe still be transmuted. Binding for a dagger grip, scrap metal melted down for pins and bowls. Parchment washed clean for new writing, if you didn't want to print, or couldn't.

This one had probably been washed as many times as it could take, the pages spiderwebbed with traces of ink in a half dozen colours, old lines pressed deep into their surfaces.

Dagna traced them with her fingers, then traced the letters that made up the most recent layer. Took time in her examination, crouched there out of sight of the afternoon crowds.

"Are you done?" Heid asked over her shoulder. Deep lines on her face, the corners of her mouth pulling down even when she wasn't frowning. Thinning hair braided, slung over one sharply angled shoulder. Nose a bit too straight for what people usually called prettiness, a bit too narrow. Easy to remember how she looked—funny that. Sometimes Dagna doesn't remember her father's face that well, but she'd always know Heid's.

Anyway, the book, and that day. Heid wasn't really angry, Dagna thought; just playing at it. Probably. Sometimes she threw Dagna out, but she always let her come back. "Some of us are trying to do business here. Can't keep watching to see you're not sneaking stuff like some duster."

Dagna considered. Remembers having considered, scraped together all the courage she could find to ask for something stupid:

"Can I take it?"

A nod to the book.

And then there had been a small miracle: Heid had been amused.

"The sodding treatise? Knock yourself out. Nobody wants it. Don't know why you do."

"It's pretty."

A sharp bark of laughter. "Alright, nuisance. Take it and get out."

She did. Took it and laid it on her bed and bent over it late into the night, came back from the forge and wiped her hands clean and opened it; crept up in the morning to fetch light and read before her work began. Kind of like first love, now she thinks about it.

Cessil of Jader's _Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Magic_ is not a very good book, she knows now, even if the copy she found was kind of editorialised by the scribe. Flawed theory from beginning to end. Doesn't matter. Sometimes a book is a door, and maybe that's enough.

Anyway, the book was the start. But it wasn't the reason.

 

 

It takes time, getting everything set up. Delicate balancing, constant adjustment to make sure all of it, forges and anvils and frames and tools, holds its magic, takes in just enough, lets just enough go, does it in the right form and the right direction. Too little and you've got something boring and old-fashioned, serviceable but not inspired. Too much, and—well, it's almost safe, she wasn't lying. Not precisely.

Some things people just don't need to think too hard about. She's got it covered.

She's in the middle of making sure she continues to have it covered, working away at new sets of long curving grooves and hard lines on the side of the temperamental main furnace, hammer and chisel, calculations in her head as she goes, when a whirlwind enters the Undercroft.

The whirlwind is yellow and red. Sends the door ricocheting off the wall, booming through the open space, and hurtles not down the stairs but directly over the brazier and towards Harritt. Although she's turned towards the door as she works, Dagna can see the sharp movement as his head jerks up in alarm at the edge of her field of vision.

"Oi, Harritt," the whirlwind says. "Where the shit are my bees?"

"They'd better bloody well not be here," Harritt says.

"Arse," the whirlwind says. "That my line, innit. Tell me, or I'll share them with you."

A pause in which Harritt says nothing at all.

"You'd better not have them here. Too bloody freezing."

Not where Dagna's sitting. The sharp radiating lines of fire-core-life glow ember-warm against her hand, even crossed with the closed curves of limit-veil-threshold to turn it inward.

Something in the direction of Harritt and the whirlwind is in fact buzzing, which is interesting.

Dagna marks off the last angle of this composite set, inspects it with critical eyes and careful fingers. It'll hold. She can spare a moment.

She turns.

An elf is staring up at Harritt, whose shoulder she doesn't reach. Messy light hair she definitely cuts herself, leggings patched and re-patched, shirt hem ragged. Good face, a fighter's face, a misfit's. Dagna's favourite kind.

She's holding a bottle.

It's the bottle that's doing the buzzing.

"Ooh," Dagna says, because bees in a bottle is a new one to her. "How did you do that?"

The elf and Harritt turn towards her in surprised unison.

She waves.

"Does it matter?" the elf says. "What _matters_ is I'm going to throw it at his stupid face if he doesn't give me the bees back."

"Andraste's tits, I don't have your sodding bees," Harritt says. "I don't have to stand here and take this. Can't a man work in peace?"

"No," the elf says, like it's the stupidest question she's ever heard.

A noise of frustrated anger from Harritt.

The door slams for a second time. Closed.

"Alright. Quarter bell before he finds Josephine, hour bell before he can get a word in. I'm Sera. You're the magical whatsit." She, Sera, pauses. Blinks. "The dwarf-y magical whatsit. Shite, seriously?"

"Seriously!" Dagna says. "I know, everyone makes that face. It's alright. I'm Dagna. You have to tell me about the bees."

"Only," Sera says, stowing the bottle of bees deftly in her hip pouch and pulling out a bundle of something leather, "if you help me find all Harritt's gloves and switch them out with these ones. Teach him to spit at people."

"Deal," Dagna says.

That brings Sera up short. "What, just like that?"

"Believe me," Dagna says. "I _really_ want to know about the bees. Also, Harritt isn't too bad, but he doesn't like pretty things, and he knocked the focus over there out of alignment yesterday. He didn't say sorry."

She doesn't expect that to set Sera laughing so hard that she doubles over, hands clutching her stomach. But there it is.

"You're my favourite now," Sera says. "Come on, let's get it done."

 

 

What was the reason, then?

A door clicking open.

”That girl of yours,” Frej said. ”You won’t get her married if you don’t get her nose out of that book.”

Mother made a noise, not quite a snort and not quite a sigh. Dagna couldn’t see her past the partition but she knew she’d be holding up her hands, warding. “You don’t need to tell _me_ that. I don’t know why you think taking the book away would be enough, though.”

Any reply was silent. A shrug? A nod?

The clink of cups on saucers. The rising scent of citrus peel, ginger. Surface things, but surface things it was apparently alright to like, because they were expensive.

Cessil of Jader wrote: _the applications of magic are theoretically limitless._

In another kind of cramped hand, in the margin, the words bleeding into the grooves of their ancestors: _if you like demons._

She flipped further through the book, away from the well-trodden introduction.

“Well, I mean,” Frej said, “she’s not bad-looking, after all.”

Mother did snort then. Definitely snorted. “And when you go to tea with Gisa, you definitely won’t say she’s insane.”

“She _is_ insane,” Frej said bluntly. “That needn’t matter. Plenty of perfectly good smiths are.”

Dagna is insane, Dagna doesn’t notice anything that isn’t to do with magic. Hopeless. Wilful, really.

The fact is that even then Dagna noticed plenty of things that had nothing to do with magic at all. She knew that Frej herself liked to wear her husband’s clothes, hurried past in them late in the evening when Dagna was meant to be asleep; went, probably, to one of the secret drinking houses that Dagna absolutely definitely didn’t know existed, hadn’t heard people gossiping about in low scandalised voices that were almost drowned under the fall of heavy hammers. What did it add up to? Something, anyway, with a name that wasn't spoken.

Frej had five children and apparently hated all of them, or possibly just the general fact of their existence. Dagna wouldn’t have wanted to be Frej’s child. She wouldn’t have wanted to be Frej, either.

“Tell that to the people we’ve tried to negotiate a contract with,” Mother said. "Bad time for it anyway, with no king. Stone alone knows how it'll fall."

 _An openness to possibilities is essential, if not in the way this arse means,_ some unknown person had written on a page that the scribe had left blank towards the back of the volume. _Think of Édouard—I mean the poet, not the damn fool enchanter. If one repeats only the standard forms, one achieves only the standard results. If one stands only in the usual place and looks in the usual direction, what can one achieve? The thing is too limited in its perspective. As in art, so in magic. Perhaps it takes an artist?_

Below: _T, you might as well scream your meaning. Subtlety?_

The first writer: _It’s overrated._

Dagna puzzled over that, at the time. Not the first, which seemed obvious, but the response. Something missing, then. A space. A thing unspoken—oh, how many things were unspoken—but apparently unsubtly referred to. 

It would be years before she would find a volume of poetry by G. Édouard, dusty and long untouched, on the shelf of a library in the Tantervale circle.

When she read it, she would be amazed both by what bad poetry it was and, in fact, by the lack of subtlety displayed by the person who had annotated her first book on magic.

Senior Enchanter Nadia, seeing her with the book in her hands, would exclaim in alarm over it—surely not Chantry approved, I cannot think—and Dagna, smiling, all wide eyes and overplayed innocence, would say—Nothing wrong with a bit of art, is there?

Nadia's blush is with her still.

But back to Orzammar. Did she suspect the meaning of the allusion when she read it, even without knowing to what it referred—or is that hindsight speaking? Frustratingly hard to test that one. Never mind.

Frej, standing, the chair catching on that one uneven tile as she pushed it back like it always did, said, “don’t leave it too long.”

“You mind your kiln and I’ll mind mine,” Mother said, and Dagna knew she’d be getting another talk in the next few days. But within the next few days, the Hero of Ferelden, casteless brand stark on his face like an insult, had swept back into Orzammar.

It seems far away. The muted light, the richly coloured floors, the rigidity. Frej is probably still unhappy in Orzammar. Dagna is helping a woman who puts bees in bottles to switch out an entire set of work gloves with a very slightly smaller set, and nobody expects she’ll marry anyone.

People still don’t think she notices anything that isn’t magic, but that’s alright. Even useful, sometimes.

 

 

In the garden, the sun is warm. You wouldn’t know you were in the mountains, sitting here surrounded by the high walls, all the green living things. The drone of bees moving from flower to flower, thronging around the row of hives.

Sera has a bottle, and a cloth soaked in some mix that she’s being cagey about the exact nature of, and is applying the latter to the inside of the neck of the former. The lazy deep scent of blood lotus, and nectar sweetness. Something more. Something that lets it all pull together.

“Wouldn’t show this to just anyone, get it?” Sera says.

Sets the bottle down.

A lazy spiral of bees, drawn in towards it.

Like magic.

Both of them watch, Sera with eyes narrowed in consideration, Dagna with fascination, itching to fetch her instruments and examine the pull on the fade. Finally, Sera plucks the bottle up, stoppers it.

The cloud of bees left outside dissipates. A slow-motion explosion.

“It’ll keep for a while,” she says. “You happy?”

“What else do you do?”

Sera shrugs. “what do you mean?”

“Bottles. You put other things in them?”

“Ice,” Sera says. “Lightning’s good, I like lightning. Fire too, but sometimes it gets away. No good with no eyebrows, right?”

“Alchemy,” Dagna says, delighted. “You’re an alchemist. Let me watch you work some more.”

A flicker of suspicion. “Hang on,” Sera says, slowly. “I thought you only liked magic. That’s what everyone says.”

“Well,” Dagna says. “Alchemy kind of is magic. From the right angle.”

“ _No_ it _isn’t,_ ” Sera says. “Look, you’re alright, but you keep that shite out of it. We're having fun. Don't ruin it.”

Oh. Well. "Maybe I just like you, then," Dagna says, and it's not a lie, only a partial truth. A transparent one, anyway. But if it works for both of them, why not. For now. "I mean, if I'm allowed to say that."

"Maybe you do, maybe you don't," Sera says. Her shoulders relax. "We'll see. You're not boring, though, I'll give you that. Not like all the noble tossers and the stuck up servants who think they can order me around because their family worked in the kitchen of Lord and Lady Arsebiscuit for five generations."

Dagna knows the type well enough. From Orzammar. From after. People do what they think they have to, probably, but in that part she really isn't very interested, so she just laughs. "Well, good!"

 

 

Having seen Sera once, Dagna sees her everywhere. She's in everything, laughing with Warden Blackwall on the wall between the upper and lower yards, the general direction of their conversation clear from the amazingly explicit gestures alone. She's with the Inquisitor in Cullen's office when Dagna stops by to drop off her proposal for improved troop armour along with the most stable of the prototypes. You didn't see anything at all, Rethsaam says, her exterior very solemn, while Sera laughs. Sera laughs a lot, totally unrestrained. It's nice. A bit alarming sometimes, but that's nice too.

She's in the kitchens when Dagna creeps through to sneak a look at the other library that nobody talks about, ingratiating herself with the girls and pissing off Cook in equal measure. She waves to Dagna, and keeps telling whatever story it is she's telling and making a mess with whatever mixture she's concocting and Dagna doesn't think any more of it until she hears footsteps behind her some time later.

She's crouching over a book so old that she's afraid the pages will come apart when she tries to turn them, inspecting it. The sketches and diagrams seem to indicate that it holds notes on a set of containment experiments, one variation after another, the scale growing. But the words are in a language she doesn't know—a script she doesn't know, even.

Step, step, step.

Dagna stands, turns, letting the book lie open on its low shelf. It's exactly who she thought it would be. Why did she think it would be Sera?

"Widdle!" Sera says. "There you are."

There's something that's probably cake batter smeared across the front of her shirt.

"Widdle?" Dagna asks, and only then remembers to look up to meet Sera's gaze.

"'Cause you are," Sera says. "Aren't you?"

"That depends what you're comparing with," Dagna says. "Not next to a nug. I'm at least five nugs."

"Next to her Inquisitorialness, for sure," Sera says. " _She's_ about five of you. Crotch height. Got its uses, right? Or maybe you're not into that."

The Inquisitor is _very_ attractive. Also, paying her a lot of money.

"If she stands too close, I can't see her past—well, you know," Dagna says anyway, because she thinks it'll make Sera laugh, and it does.

"They're right at eye level if you're me," Sera says. "Sit on my shoulders, and we'll both have a good view."

Dagna laughs.

"She grew up with a whole group of big horny people," Sera says. "Mostly women, she says. Big horny women who hit stuff for a living."

They both contemplate this in awed silence for a moment.

Dagna's gaze drifts downward again. It's only natural. Try to look up at people all the time and what you get is a sore neck.

"Hah," Sera says. "Knew it! There something on my tits, or are you just pleased to see them?"

Dagna shrugs, because she didn't leave Orzammar just to be ashamed of liking things. "Why not both," she says. "What were you making? Is any of it not on your shirt?"

"Cookies, and I bloody hope not," Sera says, but she seems a bit evasive on this point. "Why're _you_ down here, anyway?"

"Don't you think it's weird?" Dagna says. "This place is full of books, but nobody's ever here. There are servants keeping every other part of Skyhold they can get to clean, but look at the cobwebs."

"It's _creepy,_ " Sera says. "I wouldn't want to clean in here." But that doesn't stop her from throwing herself onto the single chair by the ancient, cluttered desk.

Dagna half expects it to collapse under the force, but it holds. A cloud of dust in the musty air.

Sera sneezes. "Fuck!"

"But you knew it was here," Dagna tries.

"No," Sera says. "Not that I care, but I've never seen it before. Can't keep track of every bloody door, though, can I? Just saw you'd left it open."

Sera is nothing if not an explorer. Dagna doesn't know her well, but she's pretty sure she's right on this point. Can't miss an opportunity, and if you don't know what's out there, you will, won't you?

She crouches again, touches the stones of the floor, considers. The springs that feed the waterfalls below them, the rotunda above.

Hmm.

"No," she says brightly. "I guess not. Come on, you should come down to the Undercroft with me. I've got a bow I want you to try."

 

 

Games and games and games. Knitted mittens left on Dagna's bed, _for fighting snow._ A picture of Sera holding Dagna up high so she can smack what must be snow onto the top of the Iron Bull's distinctive head. Is Sera even tall enough for that? Maybe one should measure. The mittens are nice, though. Stripey.

A mage who complained about a Dwarf playing around with magic, nothing that Dagna hasn't heard a thousand times before, is known to have paid a visit to the healer about a rash in an unfortunate place.

Dagna, after careful consideration of what Sera is likely to consider unacceptable magic and what could pass, sends Sera a box with no visible hinges that explodes when you touch the top, and Sera charges down into the Undercroft still covered in bits of the flowers that were inside it to dump lumpy crowns of the more intact blossoms unceremoniously onto Dagna's head and Harritt's best hammer.

"What do you mean, it was sweet? Didn't do anything, did I."

The second sentence of her note had contained the word _unnecessary_ , but Sera had prioritised them right, of course.

"Oh, didn't you?" Dagna says, grinning up at her. "Silly me."

It's rather fun, in the moments between the many and varied excitements of dangerous arcane mysteries.

"I do hope you're playing nicely," Rethsaam says, with a quiet quirk of her lips. "I don't know how much more fun everyone else can take. But I imagine we'll find out."

"Think of it like this," Dagna says happily. "If I'm making toys, I'm not destroying the world as we know it! There's always a bright side if you know where to look."

Rethsaam's laugh is low and warm. "Officially, I have to deny all knowledge of the fact that you may very well be our next apocalyptic event. As a friend, I have to tell you that I have every faith in your ability to destroy the world with toys. Also, please leave Solas alone. I appreciate that you like a debate, but I don't like having to listen to his catalogue of complaints about you."

"I can't help it," Dagna says. "He knows so much and he thinks that means he knows everything. I get to learn things _and_ be a nuisance."

The Shaperate was full of people who knew a bunch of things and insisted that meant they knew everything worth knowing too, but she'd been informally banned from asking awkward questions after what was generally known as the nug incident, and besides, the things Solas insists are worth knowing pretty much don't overlap at all with the sorts of things found in the Shaperate's records.

Limited perspectives, again and again.

 

 

You have to stop working sometimes, apparently. Sera has said so about twenty times this week, something about fumes or possibly unfortunate hand cramps, which would apparently be a fate worse than… well, worse than something. So they're drinking, and they're doing it in company.

In the crowded evening heat of the Herald's Rest, Sera holds court; calls people over, dismisses them as dull. The Iron Bull passes muster, with a few of his boys—only his lieutenant could actually be called a boy, as far as she can tell, and even he seems a bit old for the term; the other two are definitely elves and probably women, although she hasn't actually asked, and one shouldn't assume. Everyone thinks gender is gender is gender, and everyone means something a bit different by it anyway.

In any case:

"Dorian," Sera calls, jumps up on the bench to get a clear view. "Oi, Dorian! Get over here, you fancy arse!"

" _Oh,_ " Dagna says, looking up at Dorian, once he's fought his way through the crowd to them, expedited by Sera shouting at people until they move, "you're the one with the gilded shits. I know about you."

A moment of consternation, followed quickly by dawning realisation. "Not lately," he says. "I remain many things, but all parts of my general person and surroundings are at this time sadly ungilded. And you would be Sera's—ah—"

Sera, apparently, has tried to elbow him in the ribs and met a point rather closer to his kidneys. He's a fairly tall human, then. Probably.

"Bee advisor," she says. Pointedly? Was that a pointed comment?

Dorian rubs at his lips, a thoughtful sort of gesture, and waves a hand in acceptance.

"Yes. Of course."

He's a necromancer, unless he prefers mortalitasi. Smells of it, not a death smell as such, no rotting bodies. But there are preparations, powders, things to be burnt to maintain one's attunement and things to be burnt to make oneself clean, and these do have particular smells.

"I've heard things about you from the Imperial circles, too," she says helpfully, and this time his laugh is rather harsh.

"I'm quite certain you have, but we needn't discuss my many and impressive transgressions just now, surely. Perhaps when I've had rather more to drink."

"Oh, none of it was bad," she says.

He blinks at her in what she thinks is genuine surprise.

What was the word her acquaintances there used?

"I mostly hung out with strangers," she says. "When I wasn't busy being barred for property damage, which is apparently a thing."

That must have been right, because his shoulders relax, and he throws himself down onto the bench beside the Bull, course obviously decided.

"I was usually barred for fighting," he says.

One of the elves laughs. "You're a fucking shem bastard, but at least you'll punch anyone."

"And to that," Dorian says, "I will drink."

It has the air of a well-trodden exchange.

Dagna turns her attention to the other half of that pair of elves, Dalish tattoos, discrete magical focus hanging from her belt. "Mage?" she asks.

"Archer," the elf shoots back.

"If you're an archer, I'm the king of the Ferelden," Sera says.

"Enjoy your crown, your highness."

"Anyway," Sera says, "if you ask Widdle, everything's magic anyway. Widdle likes to ruin things. But it's alright. I like her."

Orzammar, always the ghost of Orzammar. "You would think all the technological achievements of our people would be enough for her," Mother said. "But you know, she's determined to see those as dependent on magic too. Of course there's lyrium, but lyrium isn't the entire thing."

"She's obsessed," Father said. "You know that warps how she sees things. She'll grow out of it."

"It's past time she did," Mother said.

They grow drunk. Drunker.

"Dorian," Dagna says, "do you practice the same way the mortalitasi do in Nevarra or is the Tevinter version different?"

Dorian blinks. "There are—some distinctions. As I'm sure you can imagine, the Southern Chantry has its own views on some of the finer points. They would very much rather it not be practiced at all, I imagine. One ought to burn one's dead and be done with it. And of course, my particular style requires more spontaneity than most Nevarrans would consider proper. But then, I'm rather too wonderful and talented to be concerned with such trifling details as propriety. The principles are the same, if that's what you're asking. And I do follow the cleansing rites, if you're worried that angry spirits may interrupt this very pleasant chat of ours at any moment."

"Oh, I'm not worried," Dagna says. "The veil is very strong here, I don't know if you've noticed. Stronger than anywhere else I've ever been, actually. Maybe that's why it's called Skyhold."

A moment as Dorian turns this one around in his mind, fingers tapping absently on the tabletop. "Holding back the sky, as it were? I suppose that might—"

"Oi," Sera says, "I didn't drag you out of your cave just so you could talk about work again. I'm right here, you could at least stare at my tits some more."

Dorian, taking a swallow of his beer, chokes at this—laughter, not shock.

"Oh, like you can talk," Sera says, and then, meaningfully, "oil wrestling."

"Ooh," Dagna says. "Is that a euphemism? I haven't heard that one."

"If only," Krem says. Resignation.

"It would be a good one," Dorian admits. "But in this case, no. There is in fact actual wrestling involved."

"I'll oil wrestle you whenever you like, Widdle," Sera says, leaning against Dagna heavily; arm over her shoulder, chin resting on top of her head. Warm and close. "I bet you're good at wrestling. All that _hammering._ "

 

 

Sera has a room built into the outer wall of Skyhold that she's found and co-opted, a narrow slit window looking out over the mountains, the roar of the greater waterfall rising from below. No outer sign that there's anything special going on, but inside it's dust-free, a clean chaos of bottles and jars, packs of herbs, of powders.

"Don't tell anyone," Sera says, and slams the door behind Dagna.

"You stole all this?" Dagna asks, with honest curiosity.

"Sure," Sera says. Laughs. "What, you think I'm going to risk people taking me seriously? Hello, Lady Montilyet, could I please have some more elfroot?"

"She'd give it to you," Dagna points out, reasonably, because the Inquisition has so far given her absolutely everything she's asked for, up to and including a collection of debris spat out of the fade through rifts, although Josephine wasn't too pleased with the visions of the fade that Dagna conjured up in the middle of the hall for half a dozen Orlesian nobles and two Arls to see. She hadn't mean for it to be in the hall. It had _almost_ worked the way she expected, though.

"Yeah, but," Sera says, and, throwing up a hand, "ugh."

"Oh, I'm not telling you off," Dagna says. "I'm only curious."

"Noticed _that_ one," Sera says.

Drakestone and felandaris, blood lotus and dragonthorn. A frown, an experimental poke, something new thrown into the mortar. Sera is an intuitive worker. Experience tells her what a thing should feel like and she keeps going until she finds the balance.

"So," Dagna says. "All these things, they kind of have their own magic, right?"

Cessil of Jader wrote, _the magic of plants, stones and other alchemical ingredients is entirely distinct from the magic of mages, and the two must not be confused._

Dagna likes confusing things, though.

"But you're not doing magic, you say," she adds, for clarity.

Sera rolls her eyes. "No. Catch me doing magic. Fucking demons, and it's still meant to be worth it?"

"There's magic here anyway," Dagna says.

Sera makes a disgusted noise, tongue against her lips. "This again?"

"Hey, I'm an optimist. You brought it up the other day."

Sera laughs, short and sharp. Flicks her wrist violently and nearly upsets the mortar. "No."

Dagna shrugs. "Worth a try."

"I keep telling you, Widdle, don't ruin it," she says, and then, "fuck!"

Heat flaring wildly. Bottles and stoppers, a mad scramble to avoid fire.

"Eyebrows," Sera says, meaningfully, wiping off her hands.

"Oh," Dagna says. "Well, you still look good." Without thinking, she leans forward to brush ash off Sera's face.

She's still wearing her work gloves. No touch of skin to skin. Kind of a shame.

"Ooh, are we going to kiss?" Sera says, grinning into the really very small space between them. "Widdle! You're not going to court me for a year and a day or whatever it is Reth is doing for Miss Fancy?"

Enchanter Nadia had guiltily liked romances, the kind where there's a lot of pining and delicate insinuation and maybe someone kisses someone else's hand in the end. Dagna knows the approximate form. She's never really considered it before in any sort of practical way. After all, Nadia also liked it when Elouise knelt under the desk and fucked her with her tongue, and there was really nothing romantic about any of it, and that had been fine, they'd said. Later, after Dagna had already discovered where their inclinations lay.

It was like that in some of the Southern circles, the ones that were more closed, fewer opportunities, less interest in external politics. People stole moments. Other places played other games. Not much actual romance to any of them, not like that. But stories of it, repeated in hushed voices.

In Orzammar, the only stories she remembers about people like her were things in the style of _The Fall of Paragon Branka_. Stories about illicit affairs that destroyed houses and led people to madness—not that anyone knew for sure what had happened to Branka, but that didn't stop a dozen melodramas where whatever it was could be blamed entirely on Hespith's influence.

Why do you like your boring magic books anyway, Dagna? Come and listen to the singer with us. It's a new one, and I heard the king hates it.

No thanks, Irya. I'm good.

"Do you _want_ to be courted for a year and a day?" Dagna asks, with some interest. "I mean, I can do that."

"Maybe," Sera says, snorting laughter like it's a filthy joke. "Look, I like you, and you're really pretty, and maybe I could _like_ you like you. Maybe I want to try. But not if it means you're not going to do it with me until then. You want to, right?"

"Well, yes," Dagna says, because that's an easy one. "I was being pretty obvious, wasn't I?"

" _Yes!_ " Sera says, less an answer and more a victory cry; takes Dagna's face between her hands—oh, there's touch, that's what Sera's skin feels like, work-rough and a bit dry, wonderful and very warm. The rough edge of a thumb nail against the corner of her lips. "Hey, Widdle, we're going to have so much fun."

A kiss.

A kiss that tumbles them back onto the floor, Sera above her, hands and knees. The sound of a bottle falling against the tiles, contents shifting, but no shattering crunch and no burst of heat against Dagna's skin that doesn't come from the inside.

 

 

And of course the Inquisition keeps moving, like the great machine that it is. Rethsaam drags Sera and the Iron Bull both into the Deep Roads, and Dagna misses half the fun. She missed out when they fell into the fade, too.

"Tell me about it," she says to the two of them over drinks, intent, having already missed the opportunity to bother the Inquisitor before she was called away again to Orlais. "An actual _titan._ "

"Ugh," Sera says. "We were inside it. I don't want to think about it."

Some people have always thought that lyrium was alive, and the fact that it could be blighted had seemed to support it, but this was something else.

"I wonder," Dagna says, "what would happen if an entire titan had the blight?"

"You're not friggin' helping, Widdle," Sera says. "Keep going like this and I won't eat you out later."

That gets a laugh from the Iron Bull, anyway.

"How would it compare to fighting a dragon, then?" Dagna asks the Iron Bull. "You like big things."

Sera cackles.

"Where's the fun if it's so big you can't even see it," the Bull says. "Nah. I'll take a dragon. You can _feel_ a dragon. That's a real fight. This was just—ugh. Kept getting my horns stuck on the ceiling all the way down, too."

"Does this mean that all magic is kind of blood magic," Dagna says, and both her companions make identical noises of distaste, which is impressive, considering. "Or is it like reavers drinking dragon's blood?"

"Where's Dorian when you need him to derail a creepy argument about magic. Any other creepy argument about magic would do," Sera says.

"Dorian would discuss this with me," Dagna says, without acrimony. "Dorian understands the importance of curiosity."

"I understand the importance of leaving creepy shit the fuck alone," Sera says. "Doesn't that count for anything, Widdle?"

"No," Dagna says.

"You like this all the time?" the Iron Bull asks.

"Yes," Sera says, at the same time as Dagna says, "no."

They look at each other.

"Sometimes I have my mouth full," Dagna says, and gets to see the moment when Sera's gaze softens into far-away contentment.

"That's really, really true," she says. Shrugs at the Iron Bull. "You know how it is. Also, she's _so_ good at pranks."

 

 

Afternoon sun. There had been a cave, and a length of rope, and Sera complaining about how stupid it all was in a way that mean she was worried, and Dagna had gotten the better look at the springs below the fortress she'd been after: the place where magic welled up from the stone with the water like she'd thought it must, keeping the whole place fed. Not wearing at the veil, but somehow building it up, making it stronger.

And then, of course, she'd fallen in. But it was fine. Sera had been there, after all.

And there were plenty of good ways to warm up. Dagna's room had a window, which she hadn't liked that much at first, but it was good for ventilation if something exploded a bit too much, and the sunlight _was_ nice.

It improved, too, with company. Sera's hand just rough enough on her breast, mouth hot on her neck. Fingers thrusting into her, thumb to her clit. Dust motes dancing above them in the sun, which fell gold across Sera's naked skin.

They were both damp with sweat before they were done, the freezing water of the river far away. And now here they are.

"Staff exercises," Dagna says.

"That's too obvious," Sera tells her, prodding a finger idly against Dagna's naked stomach, tracing shapes. A heart, a star, a bee. "Give me a better one."

"Let me catch my breath properly first," Dagna says, and Sera laughs uproariously.

"Not _that_."

"Oh, really?"

"Well, I mean—in a bit."

"Basement inspection," Dagna offers, in light of their recent physical activities, both sorts. "Tending flowers. Vyrantian discourse, but only in Carastes. Fraternal relations."

"What, seriously?"

"I don't think they can help it," Dagna says. "Some of them don't get out much. Well, didn't."

"What else?"

"Artistic endeavours," Dagna says, remembering the book of terrible poems. "That's only for women. Do you feel artistic yet?"

Sera snorts. "I'm a master. What about your dwarf-y place?"

Dagna raises an eyebrow. "What about the Alienage?"

"Oh, fine," Sera says. "Like that, is it?" But she leaves her hand lying flat against Dagna's stomach, fingers shifting in little ticklish circles. None of the venom she has for people who assume she'll care about elf stuff. Understanding.

"Kind of. Not really. I mean, I really did grow up there, and I'll always know it, but—I don't know. It was years ago now. I was young."

What was it they said? Peculiarities. Eccentricities. Deviations. Personal failings. External things, not the things the people involved whispered between themselves, none of those secret code words. They wouldn't have been much good as secrets if she'd known them. Maybe if she'd stayed longer, if she'd been in Orzammar as an adult, she'd have learnt what kinds of words people used there to communicate interest, confirm belonging. If she'd stayed longer, she'd also have gone mad, madder than Branka in a dozen stupid plays and songs and books, and no Hespith in sight to blame it on.

Magic, then.

Magic is the conviction that some other world is possible. Magic found her through human words in a human book and talked to her about itself, but also about—well, the other thing.

"Yes," the Hero of Ferelden had said, measuring her carefully. "I think you should go to the Circle."

She remembers particularly his sidelong glance towards the elf who stood at his side, blond hair and brown skin, sinuous black lines along one side of his face, along his arms; as absolutely opposite to everything that was Orzammar in the impression he gave off as Dagna could at that time imagine.

A look like shared understanding. Shared recognition.

But maybe that's only hindsight too.

"Looking good for an old lady," Sera says, and blows a raspberry below Dagna's navel, setting her laughing so hard that they both fall off the bed.

 

 

Another day, and Dagna is lying on her back again, although she's wearing rather more clothes on this particular occasion. Fine adjustment of the mechanical underbelly of her enchantment apparatus have been on her to-do list for some time, but the recent cleansing-corrupting confusion and the interestingly weird results it produced have added an edge of urgency to the thing, if only for completely boring practical reasons like the five hundred helmets that need warding runes added to them by the end of the week.

It's not so much as there can objectively be said to be wrong with the thing. It's not a mistake if you advance your understanding of the world through it, and the results really were _very_ interesting and very, very weird, and Dagna would happily keep going down that line of investigation to see where it leads her.

The result isn't, however, going to help a soldier not die by being hit on the dead with a demon. Commander Cullen has explained this to her several times.

So she's fixing it.

Sera is helping, for a value of helping that involves comments like _have you tried twisting the thingy on the wotsit two pegs?_ and _wow, Widdle, your legs are really great from this angle._

"My legs are always great," Dagna says, a bit muffled around the wrench in her mouth. "You just can't usually see them. Too close to the floor."

"I don't know," Sera says, "I get a pretty good view when you—"

"No," Harritt interjects, with emphasis. "Look, are you actually doing anything down here, or are you just getting in the way?"

"She's with me," Dagna calls, wrench removed for clarity, and Harritt grunts in disgust.

"Widdle," Sera says thoughtfully, after a brief pause in which Dagna actually gets about three things done, "what do you mean with that thing you keep going on about where alchemy is magic?"

"I thought you didn't want to know," Dagna says.

"Can't stop thinking about it, though, can I," Sera says. "Every time I go to make a thing, I keep wondering if there's some friggin' demon waiting to jump out and go ah-HA! Got you!"

"I don't think that's how it works," Dagna says, and scoots herself out from under the apparatus to blink up at Sera, who's sitting cross-legged on the floor. "Look at it like this. Mages do magic. It pulls through their bodies, they're talking to it. Fade and body and fade. Who leads and who follows? Who even knows. Right? It's interesting, but it's kind of messy. It's about wanting, and that's always going to go wrong somewhere."

"Alright," Sera says warily. Clearly waiting for the trap.

"Alchemy is a step removed. It's the ingredients that do the talking with the fade, and the alchemist who takes advantage of it. But that doesn't mean it's different, exactly. I mean, the magic itself isn't different. Same bits," a pause while Sera sniggers about the word _bits_ , which is probably a good sign. "Different shape."

"I don't like where you're going with this," Sera says. "This isn't fancy woo woo stuff. It's just mixing things until they do something interesting."

"No, look, I mean, I'm a dwarf but I can enchant things. And everyone agrees that's a kind of magic, even though we can't, you know. Do that. So, alchemists are magic-users. Making something bigger than all the pieces is always magic. Alchemists just aren't magic- _doers_. The magic is still magic. It only looks like science because people are stuck on form. Also, no demons, and for some reason people don't think it's magic if there're no demons."

"Oh," Sera says. "Well. That was a lot of words, about stuff."

"No demons," Dagna repeats, because this is probably the key point to get across. "Magic, yes. Demons, no. Best of both worlds."

"Maybe," Sera says slowly, settling into this new reality in which she isn't any more likely to get possessed than she was yesterday, "the plants get the demons. They're alive. And they're magic."

"What does a demon tempt a plant with?"

"Oh, arse, you're actually thinking about it," Sera says. "Widdle!"

"Don't worry," Dagna says, and pats her hand. "If any demons try to get at you, I'll make them explode. I'm really, really good at that."

"Aww," Sera says. "You're a ro _man_ tic."

"You caught me," Dagna says.

Sera's laugh is loud enough that Harritt gives them another angry look. "If anyone tells you you can't do your weird creepy magic shit, I'll shoot them in the arse," she says. "With arrows. So many arrows."

Can't and shouldn't and may categorically not.

People think they know who Dagna is, who Sera is. They think they know where the limits of the possible are. What a person can be, and what people can be, together.

They're in for a really ridiculously big surprise.

Probably one involving exploding bees.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Any Sufficiently Advanced Magic is Indistinguishable From Technology](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9125476) by [RsCreighton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RsCreighton/pseuds/RsCreighton), [SomethingIncorporeal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomethingIncorporeal/pseuds/SomethingIncorporeal)




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